The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Register Variation: A Corpus Approach 187
response to ELEVATED CO 2 . In the Scirpus community, root growth was evenly
distributed throughout the 15-cm profile, with no SIGNIFICANT differences in root
biomass among the 5-cm sampling intervals within a treatment.
All three of these features serve the purpose of densely packing the text with information
about specific referents. Nouns refer to entities or concepts, and are then further
specified by prepositional phrases, attributive adjectives, or other nouns which function
as premodifiers (e.g. root growth). Clearly, the emphasis in this text is on transmitting
information precisely and concisely, not on interactive or affective concerns.
Furthermore, by considering the scores of other registers on Dimension 1, we can
see that such densely packed informational features are not typical in more colloquial
registers of English. For this reason, it is not surprising that many novices experience
difficulty when asked to read biology research articles or write up research reports
like a professional (cf. Walvoord and McCarthy 1990; Wilkinson 1985). Even with this
very brief examination of just one dimension in the MD model of English, we can see
why, linguistically, these texts are challenging and why students are unlikely to have
had practice with such densely informational prose.
2.2 Comparison of the major oral/literate dimensions in
English, Korean, and Somali
The MD methodological approach outlined in the last section has been applied to the
analysis of register variation in English, Korean, and Somali. Biber (1995) provides a
full description of the corpora, computational and statistical techniques, linguistic
features analyzed, and multidimensional patterns of register variation for each of
these languages. That book synthesizes these studies to focus on typological comparisons
across languages. Here we present only a summary of some of the more striking
cross-linguistic comparisons.
Table 9.4 presents a summary of the major “oral/literate” dimensions in English,
Korean, and Somali. Oral/literate dimensions distinguish between stereotypical speech
– i.e. conversation – at one pole, versus stereotypical writing – i.e. informational
exposition – at the other pole. However, as discussed below, each of these dimensions
is composed of a different set of linguistic features, each has different functional
associations, and each defines a different set of relations among the full range of
spoken and written registers.
The first column in table 9.4 lists the co-occurring linguistic features that define
each dimension. Most dimensions comprise two groups of features, separated by a
dashed line on table 9.4. As discussed above for Dimension 1 in English, these two
groups represent sets of features that occur in a complementary pattern. That is,
when the features in one group occur together frequently in a text, the features in the
other group are markedly less frequent in that text, and vice versa. To interpret the
dimensions, it is important to consider likely reasons for the complementary distribution
of these two groups of features as well as the reasons for the co-occurrence
pattern within each group.
It should be emphasized that the co-occurrence patterns underlying dimensions
are determined empirically (by a statistical factor analysis) and not on any a priori